Rigging

This is the most time consuming part of the project. Since we had a very wide range of expressions and movements planned for the film, the rig was designed to be as stable as possible, but also to be very handy and easy to learn and use for animators.

The facial rig is a full bone structure based on Paul Neale's technique. Pablo Mercado, our rigger, made a series of scripts for repetitive tasks like resetting rotations, deleting keys, selection tools, etc. He also designed a small tool that, with a single button, you get the controls and a special UI for facial animation.

The body rig is a mixture of Paul Neale's and Victor Vinyal's approaches. Having the 2 schemes on one rig, we can handle very complex poses, very fast viewport feedback and blending FK/IK in hands and legs, independent squash and stretch controllers, finger and hands controls, etc.

Rendering/Shading

The main Render engine used is V-Ray; all the materials are V-Ray materials with no special qualities like SSS or translucency.

We rendered the image 4000px high for printed applications.

At the moment we are working on 2 more characters, and we'll be happy to keep updated 3DTotal about this project!